Tall, Dark And Difficult

by Patricia Coughlin

  “Jake,” provided a soft voice from the back row. Shelley Rappaport “collected” music boxes, and the scrapbook on her lap was bulging with photographs and advertisements.

  Ruth nodded happily. “That’s it. Jake. Didn’t he specialize in Meissen?”

  “I think he did,” Rose agreed.

  “Well, if he can’t help you, I’ll bet he could put us in touch with someone who can.”

  “He’s on my Wedgewood loop,” said Clare, a tall, thin woman with an easy smile. “I could drop him an e-mail and ask.”

  She was referring to one of the countless online groups that regularly corresponded to share information about a common interest. If a particularly sought-after item appeared in the window of an antique shop in Boston, news of it could quickly be relayed around the globe, triggering an international bidding war that might end with the Boston shopkeeper shipping the item to Iceland or South Africa before the close of business.

  “That would be great, Clare,” said Rose. “You can let me know what you find out at the auction on Wednesday.” Once a month, from March through October, they made the trek to a neighboring town to check out what auctioneer Ben Spencer had to offer.

  The meeting ended with the usual punch and cookies. After milling about and chatting for a while, Rose excused herself for what had become another ritual she looked forward to all week.

  Willow Haven’s sprawling complex offered a variety of living arrangements, from apartments with kitchen facilities for residents who chose to prepare one or all of their own meals, to a separate wing for those requiring full nursing care. Falling in between was the Assisted Living area.

  “Hey, Gus,” she said, stopping at the open door of the last room before the solarium.

  Gus O’Flaherty had cropped white hair, the bluest of eyes and the remnants of a brogue that eighty years away from Killarney hadn’t managed to erase. He glanced up from the baseball game he was watching and grinned broadly. “Hey, Rosie. And may I ask what took you so long?”

  “The meeting ran late.”

  Gus snorted. “Little wonder. Can’t for the life of me figure out why a pretty thing like you wants to hang out with a bunch of nit-pickin’ old blowhards like that lot.”

  “I don’t know,” she countered, strolling into the room to check out the clay pots lined up on the window ledge. “I guess I’m just drawn to nit-pickin’ old blowhards, especially the grizzly, cantankerous kind whose thumbs are as green as their roots.”

  This time his snort held an unmistakable note of flustered pleasure. “Women,” he muttered.

  “Your babies are looking good,” she remarked. “I thought this one on the end was a lost cause.”

  The window ledge was the horticultural equivalent of assisted living. Gus was devoted to raising dahlias, and he lavished attention on each and every plant, but those in his room received even more tender care. Once healthy, a plant rejoined the dozens of others that filled the solarium with color and fragrance year-round.

  “Nah,” he said, reaching for his cane and coming to stand beside her. “There’s no such thing as a lost cause, Rosie. Only tenders who give up.”

  Tenders. Tending was Gus’s word for his work with his plants and in the garden just outside the solarium, and hearing it never failed to touch her heart. There was a rare, peaceful sort of contentment in knowing there were people like Gus in the world, willing to tend to the smallest things in life and never give up.

  “Gus, did it bother you when you had to start using a cane to get around?” she asked.

  “Not as much as it would have bothered me not to get around at all.” He regarded her from beneath a furrowed, sun-browned brow. “Why? Are you worrying about getting older, Rosie?”

  “Nope.” She flashed him a smile. “I never worry about a sure thing. I was just wondering. I have this…friend, a little older than I am, who needs help getting around, and he’s a tad touchy about the whole subject.”

  “He’s using a cane, is he?”

  Rose nodded.

  “And it’s a permanent thing?”

  “Who knows?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Who knows?” she repeated, her exasperation showing. “He refuses to talk about it.”

  Gus chuckled and scratched his chin. “A little older than you, you say? And refusing to talk? Well, that explains everything.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “It’s like this. Women are born knowing what’s best for them—and for every other blessed creature on the earth in the bargain, or so they think,” he added, “but that’s another story. Men, on the other hand, take a bit longer to sort it all out.”

  “My guess is that your friend was just getting around to the important stuff when a big hand sweeps down from heaven to knock him on his arse—pardon my language—a little reminder that he’s not as invincible as he’s spent forty-odd years convincing himself he is. Life is full of those little reminders,” he added with a rueful smile, “but it’s the first one that’s hardest for a man to take.”

  “Men,” she muttered, because she knew it would make him laugh.

  “Now, about this friend…should I be jealous?”

  “Hell, no, Gus. One cranky man with a cane is all I can handle.”

  He grinned. “Then there’s only one thing left to settle. Did you come here to exercise your jawbone all night or did you come to play dominoes?”

  She grinned and pulled a polka-dot scrunchie from her pocket. A woman couldn’t play dominoes with a shark like Gus O’Flaherty with her hair falling in her eyes.

  “You pour the root beer,” she told him. “I’ll get the tiles.”

  It was shortly after ten-thirty when she returned home. Not that Griff was waiting for her. It’s just that from his chair at the end of the porch closest to the street, all he had to do was lean forward and crane his neck as far as he could to see a sliver of her driveway through an opening in the trees. He listened, heard a car door slam, and then…nothing.

  So, Mr. Saturday Night hadn’t come home with her. Which meant he wouldn’t be spending the night in her bed, he thought with a little lick of satisfaction. Of course, there was always the possibility that Rose was just returning from someone else’s bed. Griff’s satisfied smile withered as he recalled the casual way she’d been dressed when she left.

  Not that he’d been watching—but from the window on the third-floor landing there was a clear view of the back of her cottage, and he happened to have been standing there, gazing out, when she appeared wearing jeans and a pale pink sleeveless T-shirt with darker pink roses all around the V-neckline. She’d looked good. Damn good. But she clearly had not knocked herself out primping for a night of dinner and dancing at the Ritz. And while initially he’d seen that as an indication this date was No Big Deal, he was suddenly having second thoughts.

  Maybe this wasn’t simply a standing date, but a Relationship. Maybe she went over to his place every Saturday for a cozy evening of dinner and hot sex. Hell, maybe she cooked for him. Prime rib and blueberry muffins, he thought, his jaw clenching at the mere prospect of Rose sharing her muffins with another man. Especially some guy who didn’t even know enough to take her someplace nice and treat her to dinner on a Saturday night. He wondered if this jerk knew—or cared—how hard she worked.

  In the short time he’d known her, he’d figured out that she was as softhearted as she was wacky—in other words, an easy target. Why else would she be helping him when she clearly had her hands full with her own business? It bothered him that he might not be the only one taking advantage of her generosity, and it bothered him that it bothered him. After all, his interest in Rose Davenport was strictly business…if you could force yourself to refer to poking through boxes of dusty bric-a-brac in search of porcelain birds “business.”

  He stood and rested one hip against the porch rail, thinking that come winter, when the leaves fell, he’d be able to catch a glimpse of her anytime he chose. Then he remind
ed himself that with any luck he wouldn’t be there come winter. Besides, he didn’t want to turn into some creepy peeper, holed up in his old wreck of a house, waiting for the lady next door to take a shower.

  He straightened abruptly. Where the hell had that thought come from? He had no interest whatsoever in watching Rose in the shower. All right, maybe he was a little interested. He wasn’t dead, after all, just temporarily off his game. But he would never stoop to watching…unless she invited him to do so. That caveat immediately led to all sorts of intriguing possibilities.

  He did his best to ignore them. The only reason he remained outside was a lingering…not nosiness, he assured himself…concern. That was it. After all his disturbing thoughts of how Rose may have spent the evening, he just wanted to reassure himself that she was all right. He was simply being neighborly, he told himself. Knowing it was a lie. Knowing that had it been a sweet dumpy matron living next door, he’d be inside, glued to the Red Sox game—unless he heard sirens.

  Keeping watch had been just one more absolutely ridiculous impulse in what was becoming a string of them. So why stop now, he goaded himself. Why, indeed? He had no idea if her actual date had been anything like the erotically domestic version he’d imagined. But, he decided as he headed for the kitchen, he was going to take a shot at finding out.

  Armed and determined, he knocked on her back door.

  She opened it and peered quizzically at him.

  “Hi. Remember me? Griff. I live next door.”

  “I know who you are,” she retorted. “What are you doing here?”

  “Returning a favor.”

  Her eyes narrowed more.

  “You brought me breakfast in bed—so to speak,” he explained. “So I decided a midnight snack was in order.” He handed her what he’d fished out of the freezer.

  She examined the colorful cellophane wrapper with that same slightly bewildered, slightly suspicious, utterly adorable expression.

  “I didn’t have any muffins, so I grabbed the next best thing.”

  “A bean burrito,” she said without much enthusiasm, without much of any expression actually.

  “Bean and beef,” he corrected.

  “Ah. Well, thanks. As luck would have it, I don’t have any frozen burritos on hand, so this will…come in handy.”

  “No problem. I buy them by the twelve-pack.”

  “Really? I had no idea they came packaged that way.”

  He nodded. “You can get all the same flavor or a variety pack. Would you have preferred Nacho Chicken?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “This is…perfect. Thank you again.”

  He shrugged off her thanks.

  She smiled and put her hand on the doorknob.

  He rested one shoulder against the pink doorjamb, to discourage any thoughts she might have of getting rid of him.

  “So—” he said, and then lost the rest of the thought when she broke into a dazzling smile.

  “Look, Griff, if you’ve come to apologize, there’s no need.”

  “There isn’t?” he countered, scrambling to shift focus from her mouth to remembering what he should be apologizing for. Hell, he hadn’t seen her since the yard sales that morning, and he’d thought he’d handled them particularly well.

  “No. If you wanted to get out at the gate and walk the rest of the way, I should have let you, instead of insisting on driving you to the door.”

  “Oh, that,” he said, still trying to figure out where the apology should come in.

  “I don’t blame you for snapping…”

  Bingo, he thought. He was supposed to be sorry for snapping.

  “It was insensitive of me to speculate about how you were feeling,” she continued, “when it’s clearly a subject you would prefer not to discuss.”

  He had snapped at her, he realized, replaying in his mind the scene in the drive. Hell, of course he had snapped. She had just shot down his dinner invitation and then topped it off by suggesting he was too worn-out to make it to the house on his own. And she’d been right. His leg had been aching by that time. She was wrong about one thing, though; it wasn’t pain that had made him snap. It was the sudden image of her being spun around a dance floor every Saturday night by a tall, young and very graceful Fred Astaire…who also just happened to be the world’s foremost collector of teapots or some other thing she would consider enthralling.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “I don’t much like to talk about it. The fact is, I don’t much like anything about my life lately, but that’s no excuse for lashing out at you.”

  “Maybe not, but it is understandable. And I do understand, though it might not have appeared so when I tore up half the gravel in your drive, spinning out of there.”

  “It was a pretty scary moment,” he teased. “In fact, I think there are a few pebbles imbedded in my back, like shrapnel.”

  “Really?” Her attempt at concern was foiled by the laughter in her green eyes. “Because I have these really long, really sharp tweezers I could grab and—”

  “Thanks, I think I’d rather live with the pebbles…as a reminder not to turn my back on a woman…”

  “Scorned?” she suggested, when he hesitated.

  “I was going to say ‘a woman in a tizzy,’ but thought I might come off politically incorrect, or worse, insensitive.” He grinned. “Besides, if I remember correctly, I was the one scorned. Speaking of which, how was your date?”

  She did that pouty thing with her mouth. “Date?”

  “Right…you know, the regular Saturday night thing you have going.”

  “Oh. That date. It was…great,” she said. “As always.”

  “Good. That’s…good. So, did you and Mr. Saturday Night do anything special?”

  “No, not really. We just talked and…you know.” She waved her hand in the air and gave a small, awkward smile.

  Yeah, he knew, all right.

  “Later we played dominoes,” she offered.

  “Dominoes. I hear that can be very…exciting.”

  “With the right partner,” she agreed.

  “And you think you’ve found the right partner?”

  “Definitely. He’s a master at dominoes, and a number of other things.”

  “Really? Is he from around here?”

  “Not far,” she replied. “He’s originally from Ireland.”

  A European. Figured. European men had it all over American guys when it came to pretending they cared what color plate they were eating off or that they were as happy sitting in a French Provençal side chair as a recliner. Rose would be a sitting duck for a guy like that.

  “There’s something irresistible about a man with a brogue,” she remarked, confirming his hunch.

  “I’ll take your word for it. What does this guy do…besides play dominoes and speak with a brogue?”

  “He’s a horticulturist, specializing in dahlias.”

  “Fascinating,” he lied.

  “He’s actually crossbred different plants to create an entirely new variety. He’s working on another now.”

  The more she talked, the more difficulty he had looking into her eyes and not staring at her mouth. Especially when she hesitated and ran the very tip of her tongue over her bottom lip—the way she was doing right now. From out of nowhere came the urge to kiss her. It took hold of him, like a hand at the back of his neck, and he felt himself leaning closer, slowly, slowly closing the distance between them.

  She was still talking about the damn dahlias, reciting what sounded like a list of names. Unfortunately, the only words penetrating the warm fog in his head were ones that enflamed him further. Blazing. Scarlet. Splendor.

  When she eventually ran out of names, they were standing only a few inches apart, so close that it was hard to say where his body heat ended and hers began. In fact, the night around them seemed like one giant, vibrating, overheated mass of expectancy.

  “Sounds like one helluva talented guy,” he conceded. “Even if he is a little dense.”r />
  Her long lashes fluttered. “I beg your pardon?”

  Griff shrugged. “Seems to me a man would have to be dense to settle for playing dominoes when he could be painting the town with a woman like you on his arm.”

  She gazed up at him with eyes that shimmered in the moonlight. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She was gorgeous, he decided. Not simply pretty, as he’d first thought. Gorgeous. Delicate, almost ethereal, and vibrant all at the same time. And absolutely irresistible…even without a brogue.

  “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of coveralls on women,” he said, “but you’ve changed that.”

  “Really?” she said again, her voice soft and just a little breathy.

  He nodded. “Really. I’ve been thinking that you look so damn good in just any old thing, you’d be lethal if you really took time to fix yourself up.”

  “Really?”

  As heated as he was, he noted the subtle change in her inflection.

  “So you’ve been thinking, have you?” she drawled.

  “I mean—”

  She cut him off. “I know exactly what you meant, Griffin, and I know what you’re thinking, and believe me, you’re wasting your time…and your burrito.”

  Rose slapped the frozen burrito in his hand and slammed the door in his face, then stood staring at it.

  The man was impossible…self-centered…conniving… She made several angry, sputtering trips through the small house before returning to the kitchen to reclaim the glass of wine she’d just finished pouring herself when Griff knocked on the door.

  So much for a quiet, relaxing hour of reading before bed, she thought, taking a gulp. She wasn’t the temperamental type as a rule, but Griffin had a knack for getting under her skin, and disrupting her entire life in the process. And she had been letting him. But no more.

  His look of confusion as she’d shut the door on him told her that his comment about her appearance—or more accurately, her potential—had been intended as a compliment. As if she should be flattered to hear that if she only worked at it and tried hard enough and turned herself inside out, she had what it took to measure up to his standards.

  Well, she was through measuring up to anyone’s standards but her own. And Hollis Griffin was about to find that out—and in a way even an aging frat-boy like him could understand.